My take: While AI tools can help with learning, the vast majority of students use it to avoid learning
How University Students Use Claude
21–30 of 601 posts
Re: How University Students Use Claude
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think I understand what you're trying to say. We certainly improve productivity, but that is not necessarily good for humanity. Could be even worse. i.e.: my company already expect less time for some tasks given that they _know_ I'll probably use some AI to do tasks. Which means I can humanly handle more context in a given week if the metric is "labour", but you end up with your brain completely melted.
> We certainly improve productivity I think this is really still up for debate We produce more output certainly but if it's overall lower quality than previous output is that really "improved productivity"? There has to be a tipping point somewhere, where faster output of low quality work is actually decreasing productivity due to the efforts now required to keep the tower of garbage from toppling
It's not up for debate. Ask any programmer if LLMs improve productivity and the answer is 100% yes.
Re: How University Students Use Claude
#23> A common question is: “how much are students using AI to cheat?” That’s hard to answer, especially as we don’t know the specific educational context where each of Claude’s responses is being used. I built a popular product that helps teachers with this problem. Yes, it's "hard to answer", but let's be honest... it's a very very widespread problem. I've talked to hundreds of teachers about this and it's a ubiquitous…
> I think the issue is that it's so tempting to lean on AI. I remember long nights struggling to implement complex data structures in CS classes. I'd work on something for an hour before I'd have an epiphany and figure out what was wrong. But that struggling was ultimately necessary to really learn the concepts. With AI, I can simply copy/paste my code and say "hey, what's wrong with this code?" and it'll often spot it (nevermind the fact that I can just ask ChatGPT "create a b-tree in C" and it'll do it). That's amazing in a sense, but also hurts the learning process.
In the end the willingness to struggle will set apart the truly great Software Engineer from the AI-crutched. Now of course this will most of the time not be rewarded, when a company looks at two people and sees “passable” code from both but one is way more “productive” with it (the AI-crutched engineer) they’ll inititally appreciate this one more.
But in the long run they won’t be able to explain the choices made when creating the software, we will see the retraction from this type of coding when the first few companies’ security falls apart like a house of cards due to AI reliance.
It’s basically the “instant gratification vs delayed gratification” argument but wrapped in the software dev box.
Re: How University Students Use Claude
#24I loved asking questions as a kid. To the point of annoying adults. I would have loved to sit and ask these AI questions about all kinds of interests when I was young.
Re: How University Students Use Claude
#25I feel like Anthropic has an incentive to minimize how much students use LLMs to write their papers for them. In the article, I guess this would be buried in > Students also frequently used Claude to provide technical explanations or solutions for academic assignments (33.5%)—working with AI to debug and fix errors in coding assignments, implement programming algorithms and data structures, and explain or solve mathe…
Most of their categories have straightforward interpretations in terms of students using the tool to cheat. They don't seem to want to/care to analyze that further and determine which are really cheating and which are more productive uses.
I think that's a bit telling on their motivations (esp. given their recent large institutional deals with universities).
Re: How University Students Use Claude
#26I feel like Anthropic has an incentive to minimize how much students use LLMs to write their papers for them. In the article, I guess this would be buried in > Students also frequently used Claude to provide technical explanations or solutions for academic assignments (33.5%)—working with AI to debug and fix errors in coding assignments, implement programming algorithms and data structures, and explain or solve mathe…
Exactly. There's a big difference between a student having a back-and-forth dialogue with Claude around "the extent to which feudalism was one of the causes of the French Revolution.", versus another student using their smartphone to take a snapshot of the actual homework assignment, pasting it into Claude and calling it a day.
Re: How University Students Use Claude
#27> A common question is: “how much are students using AI to cheat?” That’s hard to answer, especially as we don’t know the specific educational context where each of Claude’s responses is being used. I built a popular product that helps teachers with this problem. Yes, it's "hard to answer", but let's be honest... it's a very very widespread problem. I've talked to hundreds of teachers about this and it's a ubiquitous…
Yeah, the concept of "productive struggle" is important to the education process and having a way to short circuit it seems like it leads to worse learning outcomes.
I am not sure all humans work the same way though. Some get very very nervous when they begin to struggle. So nervous that they just stop functioning.
I felt that during my time in university. I absolutely loved reading and working through dense math text books but the moment there was a time constraint the struggle turned into chaos.
Re: How University Students Use Claude
#28I simply don't waste my time reading an AD as an article. I take this as seriously as I would if McDonald's published articles about how much weight people lose eating at McDonald's.
It's more like an analysis of what items people order from McDonald's, using McDonald's own data which is otherwise very difficult to collect.
Your loss!
Re: How University Students Use Claude
#29AI bubble seems close to collapsing. God knows how many billions have been invested and we still don't have an actual use case for AI which is good for humanity.
It is helping me do that projects that would otherwise take me hours in just a few minutes, soooo, shrug.
Re: How University Students Use Claude
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think I understand what you're trying to say. We certainly improve productivity, but that is not necessarily good for humanity. Could be even worse. i.e.: my company already expect less time for some tasks given that they _know_ I'll probably use some AI to do tasks. Which means I can humanly handle more context in a given week if the metric is "labour", but you end up with your brain completely melted.
I think the core of the 'improved productivity' question will be ultimately impossible to answer. We would want to know if productivity was improved over the lifetime of a society; perhaps hundreds of years. We will have no clear A/B test from which to draw causal relationships.
This is exactly right. It also depends on how all the AGI promises shake out. If AGI really does emerge soon, it might not matter anymore whether students have any foundational knowledge. On the other hand, if you still need people to know stuff in the future, we might be creating a generation of citizens incapable of doing the job. That could be catastrophic in the long term.